One in twenty people has no sense of smell – here’s how they might get it back
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During the pandemic, a lost sense of smell was quickly identified as one of the key symptoms of COVID. Nearly four years later, one in five people in the UK is living with a decreased or distorted sense of smell, and one in twenty have anosmia – the total loss of the ability to perceive any odours at all. Smell training is one of the few treatment options for recovering a lost sense of smell – but can we make it more effective?
Smell training is a therapy that is recommended by experts for recovering a lost sense of smell. It is a simple process that involves sniffing a set of different odours – usually essential oils, or herbs and spices – every day.
The olfactory system has a unique ability to regenerate sensory neurons (nerve cells). So, just like physiotherapy where exercise helps to restore movement and function following an injury, repeated exposure to odours helps to recover the sense of smell following an infection, or other cause of smell loss (for example, traumatic head injury).
Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of smell training under laboratory conditions. But recent findings have suggested that the real-world results might be disappointing.
One reason for this is that smell training is a long-term therapy. It can take months before patients detect anything, and some people may not get any benefit at all.
In one study, researchers found that after three months of smell training, participation dropped to 88%, and further declined to 56% after six months. The reason given was that these people did not feel as though they noticed any improvement in their ability to smell.
Cross-modal associations
To remedy this, researchers are now investigating how smell training can be improved. One interesting idea is that information from our other senses, or “cross-modal associations”, can be applied to smell training to promote odour perception and improve the results.
Cross-modal associations are described as the tendency for sensory cues from different sensory systems to be matched. For example, brightness tends to be associated with loudness. Pitch is related to size. Colours are linked to temperature, and softness is matched with round shapes, while spiky shapes feel more rough. In previous studies, these associations have been shown to have a considerable influence on how sensory information is processed. Especially when it comes to olfaction.
Recent research has shown that the sense of smell is influenced by a combination of different sensory inputs – not just odours. Sensory cues such as colour, shape, and pitch are believed to play a role in the ability to correctly identify and name odours, and can influence perceptions of odour pleasantness and intensity.
In one study, participants were asked to complete a test that measured their ability to discriminate between different odours while they were presented with the colour red or yellow, an outline drawing of a strawberry or a lemon, or a combination of these colours and shapes. The results suggested that corresponding odour and colour associations (for example, the colour red and strawberry) were linked to increased olfactory performance compared with odours and colours that were not associated (for example, the colour yellow and strawberry).
While projects focusing on harnessing these cross-modal associations to improve treatments for smell loss are underway, research has already started to deliver some promising results.
In a recent study that aimed to investigate whether the effects of smell training could be improved with the addition of cross-modal associations, participants watched a guidance video containing sounds that matched the odours that they were training with. The results suggest that cross-modal interactions plus smell training improved olfactory function compared to smell training alone.
The results reported in recent studies have been promising and offer new insights into the field of olfactory science. It is hoped that this will soon lead to the development of more effective treatment options for smell recovery.
In the meantime, smell training is one of the best things you can do for a lost sense of smell, so patients are encouraged to stick with it so that they give themselves the best chance at recovery.
Emily Spencer, PhD Candidate, Olfaction, Edinburgh Napier University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Breathing Cure – by Patrick McKeown
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We’ve previously reviewed this author’s “The Oxygen Advantage”, which as you might guess from the title, was also about breathing. So, what’s different here?
While The Oxygen Advantage was mostly about improving good health with optimized breathing, and with an emphasis on sports too, The Breathing Cure is more about the two-way relationship between ill health and disordered breathing (and how to fix it).
Many kinds of illnesses can affect our breathing, and our breathing can affect many types of illness; McKeown covers a lot of these, including the obvious things like respiratory diseases (including COVID and Long COVID, as well as non-infectious respiratory conditions like asthma), but also things like diabetes and heart disease, as well as peri-disease things like chronic pain, and demi-disease things like periods and menopause.
In each case (and more), he examines what things make matters better or worse, and how to improve them.
While the style itself is just as pop-science as The Oxygen Advantage, this time it relies less on anecdote (though there are plenty of anecdotes too), and leans more heavily on a generous chapter-by-chapter scientific bibliography, with plenty of citations to back up claims.
Bottom line: if you’d like to breathe better, this book can help in very many ways.
Click here to check out The Breathing Cure, and breathe easy!
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The Checklist Manifesto – by Dr. Atul Gawande
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Dr. Gawande, himself a general surgeon, uses checklists a lot. He is, unequivocally, an expert in his field. He “shouldn’t” need a checklist to tell him to do such things as “Check you have the correct patient”. But checklists are there as a safety net. And, famously, “safety regulations are written in blood”, after all.
And, who amongst us has never made such a “silly” error? From forgetting to turn the oven on, to forgetting to take the handbrake off, it takes only a momentary distraction to think we’ve done something we haven’t.
You may be wondering: why a whole book on this? Is it just many examples of the usefulness of checklists? Because I’m already sold on that, so, what else am I going to get out of it?
Dr. Gawande also explains in clear terms:
- How to optimize “all necessary steps” with “as few steps as possible”
- The important difference between read-do checklists and do-confirm checklists
- To what extent we should try to account for the unexpected
- How to improve compliance (i.e., making sure you actually use it, no matter how tempting it will be to go “yeah this is automatic for me now” and gloss over it)
- The role of checklists in teams, and in passing on knowledge
…and more.
Bottom line: if you’ve ever tried to make tea without putting the tea-leaves in the pot, this is the book that will help you avoid making more costly mistakes—whatever your area of activity or interest.
Click here to check out the Checklist Manifesto, and make fewer mistakes!
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Ready… Set… Flow!
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Time to make your new year plans? Or maybe you’ve already made a list, and you’re checking it twice. If so, now’s the time to make sure that your new year’s plans will flow:
“Flow”, as you may be aware, is the psychological state generally defined as “a state in which we feel good about what we’re doing, and just keep doing it, at a peak performance level”; the term was coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and has risen to popularity since.
We wrote about it a little before, here:
Morning Routines That Just Flow
The above article details how to start the perfect day, but how to start the perfect year? Firstly, it’s good to get the jump on the new year a little; see:
The Science Of New Year’s Pre-Resolutions
…and we also agree with Dr. Faye Bate, who preaches taking the path of least resistance when it comes to healthy habits:
How To Actually Start A Healthy Lifestyle In The New Year
Because…
Getting into the flow
The most hydrating drink is the one that [contains adequate water and] you will actually drink. The best exercise is the one you’ll do. The best sleep is the sleep you can actually get. And so on.
We see this—or rather its evil counterpoint—a lot in diet culture. People frame their willpower against the temptations of donuts and whatever, and make Faustian bargains whereby they will eat food they find boring in the hopes it will bring them good health. And it won’t. Because, they’ll give up quickly.
Instead, each part of our healthy life has to be engaged with with a sense of flow. Again, that’s: “a state in which we feel good about what we’re doing, and just keep doing it, at a peak performance level”
So we need to find healthy recipes we like (check out our recipe section!), we need to find exercise that we like, we need to find an approach to sleep that the Geneva Convention wouldn’t consider a kind a torture, and so forth. And, ideally, not just “like” in the sense of “this is tolerable” but “like” in the sense of “I am truly passionate about this thing”.
And that’s going to look different for each of us.
Running is a great example of something that some people truly love, whereas others will do almost anything to avoid.
And food? We’ve written before about the usefulness of a “to don’t” list; it’s like a “to do” list, but it’s things we’re not going to even try to do. For example, a person with two addictions is usually advised to quit one at a time, so quitting the other would go on a “to don’t” list for now. The same goes for food; you need to enjoy what you’re eating or you won’t “feel good about what we’re doing, and just keep doing it”, per flow. So, do not deprive yourself; it won’t work anyway; just pick one healthy change to make, and then queue up any other changes for once the first one has started feeling natural to you.
For more on “to don’t” lists and other such tricks, see: How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
Staying in the flow
…is not usually a problem, you would think, because “…and just keep doing it, at peak performance level” but the fact is, sometimes we get kicked out of our flow by something external. We covered some of that in the above-linked “How To Keep On Keeping On” article, such as figuring out showstoppers in advance (for example, “if I get an injury, I will rest until it is healed”) and ideally, back-up plans.
For example, let’s say you have your dietary plan all worked out, then you are invited to someone’s birthday celebration a couple of weeks in, and you don’t want to rain on their parade, so you figure out for yourself in advance how you are going to mitigate any harm to your plans, e.g. “I will simply choose the healthiest option available, and not worry if it doesn’t meet my usual standards” or “I will simply fast” if that’s an appropriate thing for you (for some it might be, for some it might not be).
For more on this, see:
How To Avoid Slipping Into (Bad) Old Habits
Take care!
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End Your Carb Confusion – by Dr. Eric Westman & Amy Berger
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Carbs can indeed be confusing! We’ve written about it ourselves before, but there’s more to be said than fits in a single article, and sometimes a book is in order. This one is such a book.
The authors (an MD and a nutritionist) explain the ins and outs of carbohydrates of various kinds, insulin responses, and what that means for the body. They also then look at the partly-similar, partly-different processes that occur with the metabolism of fats of various kinds, and what that means for the body, too.
Ultimately they advocate for a simple and clear low-carb approach broadly consistent with keto diet macro principles, without getting too overly focused on “is this fruit/vegetable ok?” minutiae. This has the benefit of putting it well aside from the paleo diet, for example (which focuses more on pseudo-historical foods than it does on macros), and also makes it a lot easier on a practical level.
The style is very textbook-like, which makes for an easy read with plenty of information that should stick easily in most reader’s minds, rather than details getting lost in wall-of-text formatting. So, we approve of this.
There is not, by the way, a recipes section. It’s “here’s the information, now go forth and enjoy” and leaves us all to find/make our own recipes, rather than trying to guess our culinary preferences.
Bottom line: if you’d like an easy-to-read primer on understanding how carbs work, what it means for you, and what to do about it, then this is a fine book.
Click here to check out End Your Carb Confusion, and end your carb confusion!
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Cooking for Longevity – by Nisha Melvani
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Before it gets to the recipes, this book kicks off with a lot of science (much more than is usual for even healthy-eating recipe books), demystifying more nutrients than most people think of on a daily basis, what they do and where to get them, and even how to enhance nutrient absorption.
As well as an up-front ingredients list, we additionally get not just meal planning advice in the usual sense of the word, but also advice on timing various aspects of nutrition in order to enjoy the best metabolic benefits.
The recipes themselves are varied and good. It’s rare to find a recipe book that doesn’t include some redundant recipes, and this one’s no exception, but it’s better to have too much information than too little, so it’s perhaps no bad thing that all potentially necessary bases are covered.
In terms of how well it delivers on the title’s promised “cooking for longevity” and the subtitle’s promised “boosting healthspan”, the science is good; very consistent with what we write here at 10almonds, and well-referenced too.
Bottom line: if you’d like recipes to help you live longer and more healthily, then this book has exactly that.
Click here to check out Cooking For Longevity, and cook for longevity!
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An apple cider vinegar drink a day? New study shows it might help weight loss
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Made from fermented apples and naturally high in acetic acid, apple cider vinegar has been popular in recent years for its purported health benefits – from antibacterial properties to antioxidant effects and potential for helping manage blood sugars.
Its origins as a health tonic stretch much further back. Hippocrates used it to treat wounds, fever and skin sores.
An experimental study, released today, looks into whether apple cider vinegar could be effective for weight loss, reduce blood glucose levels and reduce blood lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides).
The results suggest it could reduce all three – but it might not be as simple as downing an apple cider vinegar drink a day.
What did they do?
A group of scientists in Lebanon did a double-blinded, randomised, clinical trial in a group of overweight and obese young people aged from 12–25 years.
Researchers randomly placed 30 participants in one of four groups. The participants were instructed to consume either 5, 10 or 15ml of apple cider vinegar diluted into 250ml of water each morning before they ate anything for 12 weeks. A control group consumed an inactive drink (a placebo) made (from lactic acid added to water) to look and taste the same.
Typically this sort of study provides high quality evidence as it can show cause and effect – that is the intervention (apple cider vinegar in this case) leads to a certain outcome. The study was also double-blinded, which means neither the participants or the scientists involved with collecting the data knew who was in which group.
So, what did they find?
After a period of three months apple cider vinegar consumption was linked with significant falls in body weight and body mass index (BMI). On average, those who drank apple cider vinegar during that period lost 6–8kg in weight and reduced their BMI by 2.7–3 points, depending on the dose. They also showed significant decreases in the waist and hip circumference.
The authors also report significant decreases in levels of blood glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol in the apple cider groups. This finding echoes previous studies. The placebo group, who were given water with lactic acid, had much smaller decreases in weight and BMI. There were also no significant decreases in blood glucose and blood lipids.
From animal studies, it is thought the acetic acid in apple cider vinegar may affect the expression of genes involved in burning fats for energy. The new study did not explore whether this mechanism was involved in any weight loss.
Is this good news?
While the study appears promising, there are also reasons for caution.
Firstly, study participants were aged from 12 to 25, so we can’t say whether the results could apply to everyone.
The statistical methods used in the study don’t allow us to confidently say the same amount of weight loss would occur again if the study was done again.
And while the researchers kept records of the participants’ diet and exercise during the study, these were not published in the paper. This makes it difficult to determine if diet or exercise may have had an impact. We don’t know whether participants changed the amount they ate or the types of food they ate, or whether they changed their exercise levels.
The study used a placebo which they tried to make identical in appearance and taste to the active treatment. But people may still be able to determine differences. Researchers may ask participants at the end of a study to guess which group they were in to test the integrity of the placebo. Unfortunately this was not done in this study, so we can’t be certain if the participants knew or not.
Finally, the authors do not report whether anyone dropped out of the study. This could be important and influence results if people who did not lose weight quit due to lack of motivation.
Is that you mother? The enzymes in apple cider vinegar might be health-giving.
ShutterstockAny other concerns?
Apple cider vinegar is acidic and there are concerns it may erode tooth enamel. This can be a problem with any acidic beverages, including fizzy drinks, lemon water and orange juice.
To minimise the risk of acid erosion some dentists recommend the following after drinking acidic drinks:
- rinsing out your mouth with tap water afterwards
- chewing sugar-free gum afterwards to stimulate saliva production
- avoiding brushing your teeth immediately after drinking because it might damage the teeth’s softened top layer
- drink with a straw to minimise contact with the teeth.
Rinsing with water could prevent acid damaging your teeth.
ShutterstockDown the hatch?
This study provides us with some evidence of a link between apple cider vinegar and weight loss. But before health professionals can recommend this as a weight loss strategy we need bigger and better conducted studies across a wider age range.
Such research would need to be done alongside a controlled background diet and exercise across all the participants. This would provide more robust evidence that apple cider vinegar could be a useful aid for weight loss.
Still, if you don’t mind the taste of apple cider vinegar then you could try drinking some for weight loss, alongside a healthy balanced and varied dietary intake. This study does not suggest people can eat whatever they like and drink apple cider vinegar as a way to control weight.
Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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